:Vilna, The End of the Road

Vilna, The End of the Road by Sarah Shimonovitz -2021- 158 Pages

The original manuscript of the book was written by the author in Yiddish and portions were published in newspaper in 1963. The Hebrew edition of the book was published in 1989. Edited and translated by Nathan Livneh from the Yiddish manuscript. This book is a translation of the Hebrew edition.

'Vilna, the End of the Road" is the story of the survival of a mother and daughter from a large Jewish family firmly established in Vilna, who, with the rest of the family, were also destined to be murdered and thrown into the pits at Ponar. The path of suffering began with the deportation of the Jews from their homes to the ghetto, and from there to the killing forest and the death camps. In the dead of the night, the writer boldly and with determination, jumps from the death train into the unknown, into the surrounding horror." From the Website of Jews from Vilna in Israel

From there, she started her long and tedious journey, often surrounded by deadly enemies. But she was determined to survive and reunite with her son and daughter. Time after time, she risked her life searching the forests for her beloved son, the lost partisan; thus, until the eve of the victory over Hitler, when she returns to Vilna, her city, in hope of finding her children. On her way back, alongside many armed Red Army convoys, she passed by Ponar, and remembers her loved ones, and the beloved martyrs of Vilna, sinking into melancholic reflections on the past.

This is not just the end of her personal journey. It is also the end of Jewish Vilna, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," whose reputation had spread among the Jews the world over."

Vilna was in the years before Germany invaded called the Jerusalem of Lithuania, renowned for its high scholarship. (The military occupation of Lithuania by Nazi Germany lasted from the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 to the end of the Battle of Memel on January 28, 1945.)
One of the lessons quickly learned by even casual students of the Holocaust is that the Christian citizens of countries conquered by the Germans joined in the killing of Jews with great joy and enthusiasm. In this memoir Christian Lithuanians saw getting Jews out of Vilna would give them an opportunity to steal their property and was also a way of sucking up to the Germans, who they greatly feared. There a few good Christian Lithuanians portrayed in Vilna, the End of the Road but very few. Many just liked killing Jews to whom they felt, rightly, inferior.

"For the Jews of Vilnius, the Germans brought with them the inferno itself, in all kinds of strange and different forms. And they deluged us every day, and in increasing quantities. All at once, we became completely defenseless people, or more precisely: mice in a trap. And if the Germans weren’t enough, auxiliary forces,gangs of murderers rose up, who thoroughly enjoyed serving as the “weapon bearers” of their German masters in the murdering of Jews. First in line, in the light of day, were the Lithuanian shooters. They called themselves the Ypatingas (Ypatingasis būrys; the special squad). They wanted to be more Nazi than the Nazis, and started catching Jews and shooting them on the street. Then they began to remove the Jews from their homes. They surrounded entire neighborhoods and quarters, and removed all of the men, supposedly to work, except that they were led to Ponary. “And none ever returned"
We see the level of fear rising rapidly. The Jews of Vilna knew the ultimate goal of the Germans was to kill all the Jews in the country.  The memoir does a marvellous job of letting us feel the horror.
Soon the author, a wife and mother from a well off family, is separated from her family and put on a train on the way to the camp. We know from so many memoirs the horror of the train. The author makes a daring and dangerous leap from the train. The portrayal of her efforts to survive we very exciting. She explains that she was able to pass as Christian. She pretended to be Russian. Some of the people who helped her talked about how glad they were the Germans were getting rid of the Jews.
She was elated when the Russians began to invade Lithuania.
The memoir closes with her return to Vilna where ultimately she is reunited with her daughter and she learns her son, who fought with the Partisans against the
Germans and her husband are both dead.
Christians who she had given her property before she left lie to her in a venal fashion when she asks for her property.

"We arrived in Israel in 1949 and the moment we had pretty much settled in, my mother began writing her memories. To this day, I can still remember her sitting day and night, writing and erasing and typing again, steadfastly and devotedly. What she wrote did not get published for decades. One copy went to Yad Vashem and portions were published in a Yiddish newspaper abroad. After her death, I decided to publish my mother’s memories. In honor of her extraordinary and regal personality. Her tragedy and the tragedy of the Jewish people from a personal standpoint – as they occurred. She wrote them down for her and for her family and for the next generations. It is also in memory of the Jewish Vilna that was destroyed and will never be the same again. Zuta Averbach-Shimonovitz Written by the author’s daughter in the Hebrew edition which she published in 1989."

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